If you are a fan of myOSity, you probably know that it runs on top of Microsoft’s excellent Silverlight platform.  We’ve been with Silverlight since version 2.0 and remain committed to it for many reasons which I won’t get into here (plenty of blogs out there with “Silverlight vs. Flash” posts…).

Silverlight 4 (beta 1) brings a host of new enhancements that will, in turn, allows us to add some really cool features to myOSity in the near future.  Check out this list:

• myOSity on your desktop!  Technically we could give this to you now with SL3, but there isn’t really a compelling reason to do so.  With SL4, we’ll be able to add a whole host of new capabilities that we can’t offer in the browser…
• Printing.  SL4 now supports the ability for printing, an oft requested feature from the Silverlight developer community.  Thanks to Microsoft for listening!
• Html support.  We’ll be able to give you a mini web browser/RSS experience in myOSity without hacks and workarounds.
• Local file system access.  You’ll be able to drag and drop your local files right into myOSity, and access them from any other computer if you upload them to your myOSity file system.
• Cross-domain support.  This is a technical term that means we’ll be able to write better mash-up applications, like Twitter clients, Facebook integration, etc.
• Webcam/microphone support.  Voice & Video-chat anyone?  Don’t expect this feature right away, but eventually we’ll be able to let you chat with your friends with voice and video through myOSity.

And much more!  Too many to list really, but you get the idea… good things are coming!  I should also mention that, at this time, Microsoft hasn’t licensed SL4 for public use yet, but rest assured, we’ll be moving quickly to take advantage of the new version as soon as it becomes publicly available.

If you want all the nitty gritty details, you can click here to check out the official announcement regarding SL4 Beta.

myOSity’s file system has received an important upgrade.  Now when you click “Open” on any file in the File Browser, myOSity will attempt to load an application that supports the selected file’s MIME type (.jpg, .png, etc). 

I’ve upgraded Xamla and the myOSity Image Viewer applications to take advantage of this new feature.

So here I am in the File Browser, about ready to open a Xamla file that I’ve previously uploaded to the myOSity file system from my computer…

I click “Open” on the file “myosity_mockup2.xaml" and… voila!  Xamla opens and the project file I selected is automatically loaded.

In order to check out this new feature, you’ll need to create an account (guest accounts don’t have file system access).

What’s next for the File System? 

Next up is integrated load and save directly to the file system from other applications.  Right now you can only upload files to the file system from your local computer, but that will soon change…